US President Obama proudly declares to the world that Osama Bin Laden is dead, killed as a result of a well-planned US operation.

President Obama has declared to the world that Osama bin Laden is dead and celebrates that a US hit team achieved the goal of killing him. Meanwhile, any identifiable evidence has been purposefully destroyed.

Press TV talks with Jim Brann, spokesman for Stop the War Coalition in0 London who warns that the move has an ulterior motive considering how little interest there was in capturing bin Laden by US intelligence and that the US can simply declare something to be true without following any principle, which has been characteristic of the so-called war on terror. Following is a transcript of his interview.

Press TV: The location was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan and not in the tribal area as assumed by US intelligence, in a million dollar house in a town inhabited by 500,000 in which he lived for the past five years...

Jim Brann: Before saying anything else I think it's worth pointing out that the whole of the process of the supposed discovery of the house, the killing of Osama bin Laden etc, the whole of it is an elementary violation of the norms that would apply to violent death in, for example, Britain or the US. In other words the US under the war on terror absolutely refuses to apply the very principles of respect for law and order etc, which it says it is trying to export to the rest of the world.

US authorities will tell us exactly what they want to tell us -- they follow no principle. In other words they don't have to prove for example that it was Osama bin Laden. They can simply attack a house, kill a man shoot him twice in the head, load his body on a helicopter, take it to an aircraft carrier and effectively just throw it into the Indian Ocean. And at the same time telling us how wonderful it is that they've respected all Islamic rights in doing so.

I think that's really the starting point.

I went to the FBI website two hours ago to check -- the FBI is the US Criminal Investigation agency with central responsibility for, for example, hunting Osama bin Laden and still ten years later they do not want him for the September 11 attacks. It doesn't mean that he didn't do the attack, but it means there is no necessity to abide by any known principles of criminal investigation in this matter. If they declare something to be so, it becomes so.

Press TV: Is there a deduction about the way this was conducted? Was it not just a police action, an investigation, a raid and then from what was described as (bin Laden) being shot in the head -- a summary execution? Although for ten years there has been a US-led war and occupation in Afghanistan, if we put that aside it was a basic police action don't you think? They had their information back in September 2001, now five months later they took action.

Jim Brann: Well, they closed down the bid Laden unit. They had a special bin Laden unit that was set up in 1995, which ran for ten years and was closed down at the end of 2005. And we are now five and a half years after that unit was closed down so it certainly shows how little interest there was in capturing him. At the same time they doubled their intelligence spending to 75 billion dollars a year, but they said they couldn't afford to run a special unit to hunt bin Laden. That's a fact worth noting here.

Press TV: What has this cost the US? Taking into account the reasons they gave at the beginning of going into Afghanistan and of course the so-called war on terror and how they have exercised that not only in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan making into the umbrella AFPAK region along with all the other activities, billions spent and of course a lot of people killed -- innocent civilian lives. How do you relate that to the way this announcement was made? At this point they have said they are going to continue with what they're doing.

Jim Brann: There is one very clear possibility, which is that by declaring that they have now achieved after ten years one of their stated goals of ten years ago, which was the bringing of justice of Osama bin Laden -- they stated that that was one of the central goals of the Afghan war of 2001 -- they do set up the possibility to in some way declare victory. And I think this has to be seen in the context of what for them is a terrible situation in Afghanistan.

I think it's quite possible for example that this announcement this morning relates directly back to the escape of the prisoners in Kandahar -- quite possible because in a sense it just brings good news because they are clearly not achieving the goals in Afghanistan by any measure, it's possible that they can say well we have achieved this. The drone war, which has killed something like 2,000 people in Pakistan in the past few years, which has all the hallmarks of the grossest illegality, that they can say well it's all been worth it.

And that is possible. So they could be setting up at least a drawdown if not a withdrawal not at all because they actually think that they won, but because this is probably as good as it's going to get, to declare that they've achieved this goal.

Press TV: How can we look at the lies that have been fed through the media when we look at what happened with the invasion of Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction, the forged documents that the government tried to buy yellowcake is another instance, and now we have this case -- what is there to ensure the fact that this indeed has actually occurred and how does the announcement benefit the US?

Jim Brann: First of all, as you say, we should look at the whole war on terror clearly. Things are used for quite ulterior purposes and that is clearly the number one lesson on the war on terror -- that other things are being done under the guise of some attack and I think we should see this very much in that context.

This has been announced today in a very deliberate way for ulterior motives and people should be very aware of that as it represents the entire history of the war on terror.